They just can't say, no: County Commissioners fiddling with the Urban Development Boundary policy ... by gimleteye

This Wednesday at 2 pm, a committee of the county commission will take up a proposal by County Commissioner Pepe Diaz to "tinker" with the Urban Development Boundary policy. Diaz proposes to form an advisory committee in such a way as to favor industry, of course. That is also par for the course. (Please use our search button feature, for past posts on Pepe Diaz.)

Conservation groups, bouncing from one crisis to another in recent years, can scarcely afford the trouble. Nor would it be worth it. The instructive example is the multi-year South Miami-Dade Watershed Study completed in 2010; a supposedly consensus- based group whose work entailed thousands of hours of contribution with volunteers (a minority) from conservation groups pitted against a majority that was funded and paid for by builder and trade associations. After all was said and done, after all the "consensus building", sturm und drang, after years of effort, the county commission simply put the recommendations on a shelf and washed their hands of it. Government-designed-to-fail: you bet'cha. (Do watch the HBO film, "Game Change" on Sarah Palin. How someone so unqualified could have been promoted one step from the presidency of the United States is another feather in the cap of government-designed-to-fail.)

It is curious how the economic crisis triggered by the housing bust has created an even better political climate for wrecking environmental protections than during the boom. Elected leaders at every level of government have simply collapsed into the cesspit logic that environmental regulations harms jobs. Before the crash, it was a different kind of logic (that fueled the political fortunes of wash-outs like former Miami Dade mayor Alex Penelas): we have to increase the tax base to fund what citizens want. Never mind that infrastructure deficits in Miami-Dade now total nearly $10 billion. Oh, and let's not forget: "it is what the market wants". Now, of course, it's "jobs".

Let's not leave Governor Rick Scott off the rogue's list. Scott, who knew nothing of state land use policies when he came into office, set local county commissioners into backfield motion when he shut down the last remnants of the state land use planning authority vested in the Florida Department of Community Affairs. Indeed, ever since Scott's blind hike across the political landscape, Miami-Dade development interests have been testing the boundaries.

Using the Urban Development Boundary as a scapegoat for the jobs issue is a red herring. What is really at stake is an effort to extract value for speculators who gambled on the price of real estate outside the boundary when the market was flying. Some day, the FDIC will crack down on the banks that are holding their mortgages at vastly inflated values. As usual, the speculators want taxpayers to foot the bill. Based on past precedent, they have every reason to believe if they can hold out long enough, they will. This is the real backdrop for the "initiative" by Pepe Diaz to change UDB policies. It is the same "initiative" as the one to extend SR 826 into South Dade farmland, adjacent to mega-churches and mega-frauds.

They want to know how far they can go in this brave, new world where nothing means anything. At the local level, where contributions from speculators outside the Urban Development Boundary often account for large percentages of county commission political campaigns, there is no limit.

It is not hard to imagine that the housing bust severely diminished the squadron of land use lobbyists, "environmental" lawyers, and industry engineers who troll county and city halls across the state of Florida. In downtown Miami, they need something to do to claw their incomes back-- even if there is no demand for platted subdivisions in wetlands. I am guessing that changing UDB policy serves their clients waiting for the miracle to come -- whether Lennar, the production homebuilder, or Cemex, the foreign-owned cement maker scraping up the Everglades for limestone or big tomato growers like DiMare count on land being worth its development value as platted subdivisions or land aggregators. The county commission's meddling is like a teasing a bull with a spear. Ole!

If the history were written, it would show that attacks on environmental regulations have been building from the moment that that national environmental laws were created in the 1970's through bipartisan support. That bipartisan support is a distant memory. What is going on now, under the disguise of "improvement" and rationalizing wholesale changes to the UDB, is another front of the 40 Year War on the Environment.

The Urban Development Boundary has proven, for environmental and conservation and neighborhood groups, a line worth holding. It has been an obstacle-- albeit impermanent-- to the rampant growth that pushed platted subdivisions and strip malls in Broward County right to the edge of the Everglades. Pepe Diaz is dreaming if he thinks that today's agreement would not be supplanted by tomorrow's, by another group at another time, to move the UDB. But Pepe is not dreaming, any more than the rest of the unreformable majority.

They just can't say, no.